Help me somebody – anybody – I’m a desperate woman in need of advice.
Oscar Bin Laden the terrorkitty, and Miffy, his evil sidekick, have locked horns with me – yes me - their owner, their animal companion, the one who feeds, shelters and houses them (horrid little ingrates) and I don’t know what to do.
Their campaign of feline disobedience has recently escalated in direct proportion to the amount of work I have put into the garden.
No longer content to disturb my already fragile sleep each night by yowling for attention, playing mouse-tennis or vomiting on the carpet, they are also trying to destroy my waking equilibrium. They do it using the old tried-and-true ‘toilet-torture’ method.
This involves selecting a freshly dug (and freshly planted) patch of earth. They particularly like the bits with small seedlings that are struggling skywards, with tiny green leaves seeking the sunlight. They scratch around the area, pulling out the offending seedling, adopt a thousand-yard stare, wiggle their arses and squat, releasing all sorts of noxious excremental stuff over my flowerbeds. Then they scratch out a few more seedlings, covering their horrible stinky cat crap with what’s left of my cosmos/delphinium/alyssum seedlings. They never cover it deeply enough to stop the sun baking it and making my flowerbed smell like a feline sewer.
It’s heart-breaking.
Do they use the “fallow” beds? Of course not. They only like the stuff I have toiled over, and generally only when I have planted stuff in it. It’s a conspiracy!
Short of locking them indoors with a litter-tray, thereby tempting all sorts of disasters as feline cabin fever takes hold, what can I do? My brain has been working feverishly to come up with solutions – so far with no luck.
Sewing their bums up will mean they’ll eventually explode. Yuk. Sewing their bums up and giving them little colostomy bags is better, but who gets to change the bags? No thanks!
I can’t possibly take them for a long drive and leave them in the woods – (1) I don’t have a car, and (2) it’s been done before – you read about it all the time. Cats have been known to trek hundreds and hundreds of kilometres to find their way home.
As for giving them the Long Sleep treatment – the kids would kill me – and besides, I quite like the cats when they’re not pooing in the petunias.
These terrorkitties have a long and troubled history – they’ve never liked one another – but they seem to have achieved a bonding of sorts in this shared campaign of garden destruction. Surely there’s something I can do to ensure my cats, my garden and my sanity can co-exist. Ideas, anybody?
4 comments:
Dearest Betty.
Perhaps slightly subterranean mouse traps may help. More likely they would spring moments after Oscar Bin L left the throne and thereby lob a freshly interred turd at your clothes line or your open bedroom window. Perhaps not.
How about a bit of concrete mesh bent in a tasteful arc from the front of yore Petoonia Patch to the rear thus forming an open tent like structure. This may even be hooked up to a 12 volt car battery. This may lob a freshly deturd cat skywards toward you clothes line or open window.
Perhaps it is the lesser of two weevils.
P
The poo-lobbing mousetrap would only be good if it lobbed the poo at its creator, methinks, but I rather like the idea of the cat-apult! You're a genius Pete :-)
Dear Betty
Similar problem with Morty and Milly - the wee cherubs decided my freshly-potted umbrella tree was a perfect alternative to either the litter tray or the Queensland-sunbaked garden. None of the proprietary cat-scaring scented things seemed to work, so I resorted to a bit of chicken wire over the top of the wide flat pot. Worked a treat - one of them tried a couple of times to scratch up the surface, but gave up in disgust.
Of course I don't have that problem in Tassie - no pot plants, besides it's too damned cold to go outside some mornings, so they use the litter tray...
Maybe that's all you need to do - wait for winter! :-)
love j
ooh yes, chicken wire!
When I first moved to Canberra and lived in a different house, there were two blokes next door who were growing, um, interesting stuff in their back yard. They had it covered by "arches" of chook wire to stop their enormous chooks getting high. My Miffy used to go into their yard, and I was worried that she would attack the monster chickens, but I think she was just eating the plants, coz she used to come home and spend hours bobbing her head at the carpet. At first I thought she was having an identity crisis and thinking she was a chicken, pecking at the ground, but later realised she was off her face, looking at the carpet and thinking "look at the colours, man...."
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